The Power of Guest Blogging and How To Do It Effectively

If you are looking to generate traffic to your website, you may want to consider guest blogging. It is a very effective strategy that involves reaching out to someone else’s established audience in a bid to gain more followers. The idea is to present your expertise as an author while prompting interested people to visit your website. Your guest blog should be useful and informative to catch the readers’ attention. You can also use guest posting to generate backlinks and improve your SEO rankings. From this end, you cannot afford to go wrong. But how do you ensure everything goes right? The answer lies in the pre-and post-writing stages.

Read on to understand the 3 stages of doing guest post right.

Looking for Suitable Guest Blogs

First things first: you need to identify where you are going to publish your guest post before doing anything else. Google will come in handy when performing this search. Look up your “keyword”, followed by “submit a guest post”, and then wait for the results. Another way to find websites accepting guest blogs is to join a popular blogging community through social media and other resources. Alternatively, you could advertise yourself with self-published ads stating your desire to write guest posts on certain topics.

Analyzing your competitors can also go a long way towards helping you find websites that support guest posting. One way you can do this is by searching the name of the competitor (whether it is a successful blogger or a famous name in your industry) in Google, with the words “guest post by” at the end. Any website where that specific blogger has posted their guest content will appear in the results. Contact the owners and enquire of any guest blogging opportunities. The second option is to employ an Open Site Explorer tool to perform a backlink analysis of your competitors’ websites, or simply check whether they’re promoting their guest posts on their social media accounts.

Once you have the relevant websites, the next step is to check whether they meet certain criteria. How many comments and shares do their posts get? Do they promote their content in social media? If so, this could increase their chances of promoting your posts as well. More importantly, only work with blogs that match your status and steer away from those that seem rather low for your standards.

Creating Effective Guest Posts

Now that you are familiar with where to present your blog posts, you need to create content that will encourage new visitors to your site. Start by analyzing the current content on the website you wish to publish your guest post, assessing whether it is designed for beginners or advanced users and if it is just temporarily relevant information or fact-based. Find out if it is a B2B or B2C blog, and the type of writing style preferred by the readers. The most popular writing styles include personal stories, step-by-step guides, how-to-do tutorials, and content that relies heavily on life stories, infographics statistics, images, and so forth.

Be sure to read the guidelines carefully before making your submission. Some of the requirements may include dividing your content into sections, providing a catchy introduction, an extended conclusion, images, and so on. Some websites tend to frown upon the use of “You” and “I” pronouns, and will not accept any content that is written like that. Whatever the case, make sure that you are conversant with all the requirements.

In some cases, you may not be allowed to attach your personal bio to the guest post. You can overcome this by including some details in the actual post, but keep in mind that the article is not about you. It is meant to provide valuable information to the readers – advertising your website comes second.

When trying to lure new readers to your website, you could mention some of the posts you’ve written previously – as long as they are related to the topic at hand. Incorporate catchy anchors into your article instead of direct advertising. The links should appear naturally in the text; otherwise they will sound too promotional. Ensure that your guest posts promote interaction, commenting, and sharing. You can do this by including a strong call-to-action encouraging users to ask questions or provide feedback about certain aspects that stand out in the article.

Monitoring Your Results

The primary aim of guest posting is to generate traffic and gain exposure, so it is important to measure and improve your results consistently. Google Analytics is a great tool for highlighting the traffic being driven by the guest blog you published. Create an Advanced Segment to help you determine the effectiveness of your guest blogging strategy in attracting new users.

If you have contributed to multiple websites, you can use the results to determine which ones are more productive at generating traffic so that you can concentrate more on them than others. Some websites may not yield very good results because of the audience being biased against posts written by other people, or you may find that your writing skills are more suitable for B2B markets. Try out different content structuring methods, headline styles, and call-to-action messages.

If you have just ventured into the blogging world, the thought of publishing your posts elsewhere can seem redundant when you don’t even have enough time to write for your own website. Unfortunately, this is a terrible mindset that plagues too many upcoming bloggers. Whether your blog is populated with useful content or is scanty with just a few posts, it always pays to have articles published in multiple resources other than your own. Remember to pay special attention to how you deliver the content. Write original and engaging articles, and most importantly, promote interaction with your readers.

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About Author

Ogunrinola Adam Hiidee is a Man of Many Hats. He is the Founder of TechBlogNG.Net. He writes contents on Gadgets, Technology, Internet, Blogging Tips, Social Networks, etc. He loves to share knowledge with others through Blogging. You can connect with him on Facebook, and Twitter.

Thanks for the idea of guest blog post. I want to create backlinks for my site, this is a good option. This may help me in getting more traffic through the links. Can you please suggest some other ways to create backlinks for my site, which can attract some traffic to my website?